Titanic survivors: Their enduring stories

They are all gone now – the Titanic survivors. No human being who stood on her decks that night remains to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain.

From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know: Who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912 – when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 705 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats.

Each survivor who descended the gangway had a story to tell – and the world wanted to hear them all. The New York Times sent an army of reporters to fill that need – and gave us stories such as that from Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless man.” The junior operator relayed the story of the ship’s band. “The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while still we were working wireless when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing ‘Autumn.’ How they ever did it I cannot imagine.”

There were stories of heroism – such as that of Edith Evans, 36, who was waiting to board Collapsible D, the last boat to leave Titanic, when she turned to Caroline Brown and said, “You go first. You have children waiting at home.” The sacrifice cost Evans her life, but as Mrs. Brown said later, “It was a heroic sacrifice, and as long as I live I shall hold her memory dear as my preserver, who prefered to die so that I might live.”

There was cowardice. Most men who survived found themselves trying to explain how they survived when women and children had died, but most of this vitriol was directed at White Star Chairman J. Bruce Ismay, who survived the sinking of the ship he had commissioned. Ostracized by society and haunted by negative press, Ismay remained a virtual recluse for the rest of his life and died at age 74 in 1937.

There was mystery. Two little French boys had been placed aboard Collapsible D by their father, known to those on board as “Mr. Hoffman.” Having lost their father, and not being able to speak English or explain who they were, the boys became known as “The Titanic Waifs” in photographs that were carried in newspapers worldwide. Their mother back in France recognized her sons and sailed to New York to reclaim them. The boys’ father, whose real name was Michel Navratil, had been in the midst of a bitter divorce and had abducted the boys before boarding Titanic.

Mostly, there was loss. On her return to New York after picking up Titanic’s survivors, Carpathia had become known as a ship of widows. Rene Harris, who lost her husband, Broadway producer Henry Harris, in the disaster, later spoke of her loss when she said, “It was not a night to remember. It was a night to forget.”
Some survivors wrote books so that the world would never forget Titanic or her last night.

The first books came from Archibald Gracie, who died before “The Truth About the Titanic” was published, and second class passenger Lawrence Beesley, who in “The Loss of the Titanic” wrote that “No living person should seek to dwell in thought for one moment on such a disaster except in the endeavour to glean from it knowledge that will be of profit to the whole world in the future. When such knowledge is practically applied in the construction, equipment and navigation of passenger steamers – and not until then – will be the time to cease to think of the Titanic disaster and of the hundreds of men and women so needlessly sacrificed.”

Others kept in touch through letters or meetings. Gladys Cherry, who along with her cousin the Countess of Rothes left Titanic in lifeboat 8, later wrote to Able Seaman Thomas Jones that “The dreadful regret I shall always have, and I know you share with me, is that we ought to have gone back to see whom we could pick up; but if you remember, there was only an American lady, my cousin, self and you who wanted to return.”

The Titanic haunted her surviving officers, none of whom ever received their own commands, perhaps a consequence of their association with the most famous of shipwrecks.

The wreck was something most Titanic survivors preferred not to talk about even to relatives. Most of those who were children in 1912 only began to speak of the disaster late in life. Those who did speak became star guests at events sponsored by the Titanic Historical Society.

Millvina Dean was only nine weeks old when she sailed on Titanic with her parents and brother. Her father died in the disaster, and the family returned to England, where she lived the rest of her life.
“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” Dean aid. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”
For the last two decades of her life, Dean attended Titanic conventions and granted interviews in which she talked about the tragedy that had claimed her father so many years before. She refused to see James Cameron’s Titanic for fear of memories it would stir about her father. “It would have made me think, did he jump overboard or did he go down with the ship?’” she said. “I would have been very emotional.”

Millvina had been a star from the moment she was brought aboard Carpathia, where women clamored to hold “this lovable mite of humanity,” and when she died at age 97 on May 31, 2009, the 98th anniversary of the Titanic’s launch, we lost our last living link to the Titanic.

They have gone – and we must commemorate the disaster without them, but each life saved contains a lesson for the world.

As survivor Jack Thayer said, “There was peace, and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912.”

It consists of a six-floor building
located right beside the historic site where Titanic was constructed. It is the
latest and the biggest tourist attraction for visitors of Belfast and Northern
Ireland.

jakiyah

im doing a project on the titanic surviors . do you know where i can find articles on the surviors besides this one ?

RawrDinosawr

Just thinking about the disaster that was the titanic makes me want to cry.. Im 13 and have been obssessed with the titanic ever since i was ten

Kristen Iversen is the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Her forthcoming book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, will be published in June.

Daniel Allen Butler is the author of nine books and a maritime and military historian. Among his books are "Unsinkable" -- the Full Story of RMS Titanic" and "The Other Side of the Night -- the Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic was Lost."

Janet Kalstrom became a docent at the Molly Brown House Museum in Denver after a 37-year banking career. As part of her work as a docent, she dresses in period costume to play Margaret "Molly" Brown at the museum.

As part of the Denver Post's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, we've invited five experts in some aspect of the tragedy to blog for our website. Their fascination with the topic, in many ways, mirrors the enduring fascination of us all with the story of the giant oceanliner that hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. Over the next month, our bloggers will provide us insights into the ship's history, the cultural context of the times and the passengers, including the indomitable Margaret "Molly" Brown of Denver who was aboard the vessel when it went down. One of our writers will even share her experience of participating in the Titanic Memorial Cruise, which sails in April from Southampton and retraces the route of the Titanic on its fateful voyage.